


The Firefly Frame

by ActuallyAndroid



Category: Fire Emblem Heroes, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Confessions, F/M, Fluff, M/M, halloween henry, yes it is in fact vamp time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 19:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ActuallyAndroid/pseuds/ActuallyAndroid
Summary: Far from the repartee of the Halloween festival, fireflies gather around a lonely tent to watch the flicker of a lantern.





	The Firefly Frame

The noise of a busy, Halloween festival carries through the palace like the ripple—loudest at the mess hall where the order of heroes shares jokes and mead, and a quiet, soft muffle of background noise on the outskirts of the castle, where fireflies gather around your opened tent, trespassing on the firelight that flickers in and out from your lantern as you tend to a hole in Henry’s outfit.

You’d be hard pressed to admit he looks good as a vampire out loud, but you can’t quite forget the churning in your stomach when he flashed the sharp tips of his fangs (you assume fake, though with his tendency for curses you’re not entirely sure) over his curious smile when he asked if you liked it.

(You did. A lot.)

Absentmindedly, you swat at a fly circling about your head, and the memory goes with it, an unwanted irritation that makes you extremely wary of any mind-reading curses Henry may or may not be employing.

“Henry, would you mind closing the tent flap?” you ask, and go back to digging about in a leather satchel for a thread that more or less matches the off-white colour of his sleeve. “The bugs are getting in.”

Recently, whenever Henry looks at you, you’ve found he does it with an intense focus that freezes the blood in your veins, and this time is no exception. He doesn’t exactly look you up and down, but there’s a sense of depth to his usually surface-level smile that throws you for a loop.

“Aw, I thought the fireflies were romantic,” he says, but obediently stands up to do as you asked. When the tent flap falls shut, the muffled noise of far-away talking nearly thins to silence. He sits back down at your side, fiddling with the tear in his sleeve, and you almost forget you’re supposed to be getting to work in favour of looking at the way the orange light flickers against his skin.

“Romantic?” you ask, trying not to think about the meaning it probably doesn’t have.

He looks at you, and you catch yourself, sheepishly going back to sifting through the bag until you find the thread you're looking for.

“Don’cha think?”

You distract yourself by sifting the thread through a needle, and it misses thrice before you cut the tip with a pair of scissors from your satchel and rethread it successfully.

“Sure. Only thing we need is some rose petals to scatter,” you say sarcastically, though not without a hint of amusement. (His positivity has a tendency of being contagious.) “Now, come closer. I need to fix your costume.”

Henry, as always, is eager to listen to you. Over-eager, you might even say, based off the way he shuffles inward until your thighs touch. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s unfamiliar enough that if you weren’t so touch starved (not an uncommon complaint in the order of heroes, given how often festivals and the sort are interrupted with battles), and weren’t so tipsy (because having said that, this one has been going surprisingly smoothly—probably thanks to the breakneck pace at which the mead has been disappearing), you’d probably have shied away from him.

“Is this okay?” he asks expectantly.

"Yeah," you say and nod, trying to cover the inevitably forceful swallow that follows with the shuffling of your clothes. "Now pass me your arm."

The needle, held between your thumb and forefinger, glints in the light, and the thread hanging down from it trails across your white cloak. In retrospect, wearing your everyday clothes, painting your face white, and claiming to be dressed as a ghost was probably a little on the lazy side for a Halloween festival, but there’s only so much you can do with a notice of four and a half hours when all the bandages have already been stolen from the medical room. You stumbled into the mess hall to see fifty werewolves (there was plenty of animal fur lying around), another fifty witches (repurposed mage costumes, no doubt), and a crowd about three times that size of bandaged mummies.

Henry’s slim arm feels light on your thigh when he places it on your leg, and his hand gently curls against your knee. The tear is clearly on show—a long, thin line that runs from his wrist a couple of inches along his forearm.

“That’s bigger than it was when I last looked at it,” you say, starting with a simple knot at one end, looping the thread in on itself.

“I’ve been fiddling with it,” he admits, though he doesn’t seem nearly as sheepish as he should be.

“Why?” you ask absentmindedly, still focused on sewing.

The thread bridges over the tear four times before the silence grows uncomfortable, and you meet his eyes to feel a shiver that rushes through your back and stabs needles into your neck. For a moment, he looks like he’s going to say something important, but the tension quickly runs into the air when (with an obtuse smile and a happy tone that pitches itself a little too high) he proclaims he doesn’t know.

Somehow, you can’t quite believe him.

“If you left it alone, I could have fixed it faster,” is all you respond with. You’re not entirely sure how to breach it when it’s such an innocuous question, so you opt to move on. The tent is almost entirely still, alive only with the slow, deliberate movement of your sewing and the erratic fluttering of the lantern, while the silence drags—though not uncomfortably. A soft, background hum of talk and laughter still ebbs from far-away, a bustle that feels incredibly distant from the languid peacefulness of the tent.

When Henry first dragged you away and asked if you could fix his costume, you were reluctant to peel yourself away from the festival. Hector (dressed as a werewolf) had just finished a peer-pressure-inspired drinking contest with Eliwood (mummy), and though Hector predictably drank him completely under the table, Eliwood outlasted everyone’s expectations nevertheless, and both of them looked about ready to drop unconscious by the time Eliwood legged it out of the mess hall and retched the majority of the evening’s alcohol into the flower garden's camellia shrubs.

Although sewing a tear in Henry’s outfit isn’t nearly as entertaining, you’re surprised at how pleasant the break from the festival has been. The faint ringing in your ears has entirely subsided, and the satisfied good-humour still rings in your chest (though you’re tempted to put that down to Henry’s good company. He’s never been hard to talk to, and his optimistic, go-lucky attitude is endearing in all the right ways, even if there is something a little off and nervous about it now).

Still, your good mood must not show on your face, because the next thing Henry says is soft and unsure.

“Hey, are you mad?” he asks. There’s nothing on his face that reveals insecurity, but you know better than to base his mood off his expression.

“For having to sew the tear up? Not at all,” you say honestly, looping the thread through the tear again. You’re about three quarters done with it now, but you’re in no hurry. “Why are you asking?”

Henry’s answer doesn’t come instantly. As you wait, you shuffle about in your seat, and the lantern flickers violently at the movement, colouring Henry’s smile in flashes of black and orange.

“Well, y'see,” he begins, and his warm, zealous tone is (as always) a constant. “I didn’t think you’d mind having to fix my sleeve if I asked nice enough. You’re always helping everyone out anyway." It’s background, but you can feel the way the grip of his hand tightens around your knee. “But then I started thinking about _why_ I went straight to you, and why I started trying to make the hole bigger as soon as you agreed to fix it.”

You stop sewing so you can focus on him, and your needle hovers tentatively in the air. Even without looking in a mirror, you know your face is hopeful, expectant.

“And I thought, maybe, you’d think I was greedy...” he continues, and as the light from the lantern briefly dims, his voice turns a little quieter, “if you knew it was just so I could have you to myself.”

Your breath cuts short in your throat, and the firefly in your tent lights the side of Henry’s face shrouded in shadow. The needle poised neatly above Henry’s skin drifts out from your field of vision, and you stare at him, words clogged and insufficient.

“Know what I mean?” he asks.

You think you do, so you nod.

“Ooh, good! That makes things easy,” he continues, and laughs. It’s bright and shrill, and everything you’ve been missing from his abnormal silence. “Cause see, I really think I like you.”

The lantern blazes; Henry looks at you expectantly.

“Like?” you ask dumbly.

“Yeah. Like-like. Y’know, all the kissing and getting married and all that.”

With an ungraceful jilt, your hands drop in shock, and in turn, the needle they were holding scrapes against Henry’s arm—drawing blood.

“Oh Gods! Sorry!” you stumble to find anything to stop the bleeding, but everything in your tent feels like overkill what looks to be only a few drops of blood, so you resort to just pressing down on his arm.

“Aw, don’t worry about it," he assures you. Enraptured, he watches a drop gather at the surface of the scrape, and just when you think he’s going to let it run down his forearm and stain his outfit, he leans into it. "Vampires like blood,” he says, and laughs before licking it off. The way he flashes his fangs feels entirely too deliberate, and you seriously begin to consider the possibility he was employing some sort of mind-reading, especially when he looks up from what is basically your lap (his hand is till strewn across your crossed legs) and slowly trails his tongue across his fangs.

“Oh,” you begin, and swallow thickly, incapable of taking your eyes off them, “they do, huh?”

“Yep!”

He seems unperturbed, and it only serves to make you feel more antsy. The thrum of your heartbeat becomes deafening; you hear it in your chest, ears, throat—

“But if you still feel bad about it,” he continues, trailing off suspiciously. The lantern flickers nervously as Henry shuffles inward and ghosts his breath on your neck, teasing rows of goosebumps all the way from the back of your neck to the base of your back.

“You can give me some of yours.”

(Definitely most in your throat.)

You move your hands up to push against him (or pull him closer, it’s hard to tell in the heat of the moment), but he moves away before you reach him, and your hand hovers uselessly, half-outstretched in front of your chest. The grin on his face is frustratingly satisfied, like he’s just finished telling a joke.

A strangled (and not all that appreciated) voice in your head really hopes it isn’t.

“And… if I say yes?” you ask bashfully.

To your surprise, he actually sits back and considers it seriously, like he wasn’t the one who brought it up in the first place.

“Honestly, I didn’t think that far,” he says, and taps the fangs that peek beneath the curl of his lip as his smile stretches. “These fangs are fake, see.”

The sigh that slips out of your mouth is equal parts relief and disappointment.

“I mean,” he continues, “I can make ‘em real if you want, but that might—”

“No, that’s alright,” you say, and this time you’re the one laughing. The busy hum of the festival continues while you relish in the silence, and an intimate, raspy whisper rolls through your voice. “They’d probably get in the way of all the kissing we’re about to do, anyway.”

“Kissing?” he repeats. There’s an excited glint to his eye, and you recognise his eagerness in the way he sits up, shuffling his legs closer to yours.

“Yeah, you know: hugging, kissing, getting married and all that.”

You feel the needle (still attached by a thread to his sleeve) lightly trail over your leg as he moves his hand off your thigh and intertwines his fingers with yours. He’s close enough that he could rest his forehead on yours without leaning forward, and his voice climbs down to a whisper as he rubs the side of your hand with his thumb.

“Can we start now?”

The lantern burns, and the shadows on his face jitter playfully.

“We can start when I’m finished fixing your costume,” you say, and flash him a cheeky smile.

Though he looks disappointed, he still hums an affirmation and untangles his fingers from yours. His smile isn’t nervous or timid as he rests his arm on your crossed legs again (which is a relief) just impatient and maybe a little greedy.

“Okay,” he says, obedient as always. “Just don’t keep me waiting too long.”

“Or what?” you tease as you turn back to the unfinished stitch.

The lantern settles but doesn’t still entirely—an unpredictable flicker that you see most vividly as a reflection in his eyes.

“I might bite.”


End file.
